Malaysian Defence Minister and acting Transport Minister Hishamuddin Hussin hugs a family member of a missing Malaysian Airlines flight MH370 during his visit in Putrajaya on March 29, 2014. Photo: EPA

Over half of Malaysians say their government have been withholding information in the hunt for the missing Malaysia Airlines jet, a survey by a Malaysian opinion research firm has found.

The poll results, reported in news portal The Malaysian Insider, indicated that 54 per cent of the 1,029 respondents believed the Malaysian government hid information about Malaysia Airlines flight MH370. The Boeing 777-200 plane disappeared from civilian radar screens hours after taking off from Kuala Lumpur en route to Beijing on March 8.

Some 26 per cent of the respondents said the government had been truthful, while one fifth said they were unsure.

Almost all of the ethnic Chinese Malaysians who took part in the poll, along with a slight majority of Malay and Indian respondents, said they doubted the government had been transparent about information on the missing flight.

The survey was conducted by the opinion research firm Merdeka Centre from March 24 to 30, according to The Malaysian Insider.

Over a thousand respondents, proportional to the population in each parliamentary constituency, were selected through random stratified sampling methods in line with ethnicity, gender and age, said the firm.

The survey results did not surprise Wan Saiful Wan Jan, Chief Executive Officer of the Kuala Lumpur-based think tank Institute for Democracy and Economic Affairs, who said the Malaysian government had a reputation for keeping information to itself.

“In fact, having press conferences on a daily basis is unthinkable before the MH370 crisis,” said Wan Saiful.

A common practice of the Malaysian government in handling domestic issues, he said, was to make announcement without taking any questions from the press.

Malaysian authorities have attracted much criticism for its poor handling of the missing jet crisis, especially during the first week when different government bodies were busy giving conflicting statements, and were later revealed to have withheld crucial radar data.

“The government is not willing to give away military secrets like the radar capability, and that it does not have the technical capability to confirm much of the information, and lacks efficient communication among different government departments,” said James Chin, a political science scholar.

The professor from Monash University in Malaysia said the half-century-long authoritarian leadership led to the state’s lack of transparency.

“Malaysia is a semi-authoritarian state. The ruling party has been in power since the founding of the country, and it is not used to being questioned,” said Chin.

Nearly a month into the search, Malaysia’s acting transport minister Hishammuddin Hussein said on April 5 that an independent investigator would be appointed to try and find out what happened to flight MH370.

Wan Saiful said the disappearance of MH370 has thrust the Malaysian government into the international spotlight and thus forced it to become more transparent to the media.

“There has been great improvement, thought we are still far from meeting the international standard,” he added.

But Chin was not as optimistic.

“It [Malaysian government] will go back to their common practice after the flight saga ends. Unless there’s a change in power, there will be no chance for a more transparent government.”

All this blame about Malaysia and technology is nonsense, everyone has been side tracked from the actually incident. All mechanisms which rely on humans will ultimately have the risk of assets going rogue. Unfortunately we can’t go much about it.
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If the radar was not shutdown and pilots didn't comply with any instructions, image which country would have the dilemma of shooting it down? Maybe Malaysia did just turned a blind eye after all.

caractacus Apr 14th 20144:33pm

There may be a technological solution which prevents aircraft disappearing off the radar in future, but what difference could it have made even if the Malaysian authorities had been fully transparent?
They could not have prevented this accident.

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CatherineOhlLaw Apr 15th 201410:32am

Transparency starts with good grammar. what on earth did all this below mean ?

kennethrinderhagen@****** Apr 15th 20144:08am

The transparency of the government relies on the transparency of the issues and in this case the evidence. One being that it was five hours after last contact before the alarm was sounded that the aircraft was in trouble it was not until after it was supposed to be at its destination. There have evidence of flight returning to Kuala Lumpur and evidence that the craft made it as far as Hong Kong that is the evidence being, researched five hours after.
1. If it was high jacked it went at least five hours away if it did not stop and fuel which it then could have traveled any were around the globe is that transparent
2. If it crashed into land it obviously is not in a populated area as someone would have reported it and the hard evidence then discovered
3. If it crashed at sea five hours is a long time for the tide and current to move debris and sink the debris in very deep waters
I see no transparency in the consumer; the responsible entities are being, pushed into looking under rocks to see what is there
Why would those putting up effort to search and find be the ones accused of the abnormal disaster
It is a rare case, which out of 239 individuals not one has come forward after 37 days not one piece of aircraft has been located after 37 days
You want transparency It would be nice to know if the rift craft had succeeded through Vietnam and into Hong Kong before it become invisible to air traffic control culture barriers might be playing a role however

sy.levine.5 Apr 14th 20143:44pm

The Black Pingers Batteries Have Run Down Yet We Can Prevent Future MH370 Tragedies Give The Passengers and Their Families A Memorial “The Real-time Utilization of DFDR Data – Remote Flight Recorder”
To prevent these recurring crashes, and that is what the MH370 tragedy is, we should make the DFDR data public and telemetered to the ground in real-time (suppressing the data by labeling it private put passengers in harm’s way and should be illegal). The data telemetered/streamed to the ground would be safely stored. Using that data streamed to the ground in real-time we would know an aircraft’s position, velocity and heading every second. The remote flight recorder, data streaming black box, can be used in the present autopsy mode, to get to crash sites quickly and possibly to contact the pilot of a potentially life threatening failure. That is exactly how we got the astronauts home from the moon. The ground crew found a problem in the capsule and then notified the astronauts. Using ground simulators the ground crew found the best way to handle the situation
and contacted the astronauts as to what to do and they returned home
safely. This successful methodology can easily be applied to carrier aircraft to reduce fatal accidents. Also, by telemetering the DFDR to the ground from pre-flight to post-flight we can determine if the DFDR is functioning properly and if the aircraft is functioning properly before an accident occurs. When a crash occurs we